Pat Darling

Born as Janet Patteson Gunther, her great grandfather, Archdeacon James Gunther, was a missionary to indigenous Australians at Wellington, New South Wales. Her grandfather, Archdeacon William Gunther, was rector of St John's, Parramatta. The second eldest of eight children, she attended bush schools before leaving school at 12 to help out at home in the farm.[1]

She trained in general nursing at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown, and worked as a private nurse until enlisting in 1940 with the 2nd/10th Australian General Hospital. She sailed to Singapore in February 1941. She was one of the Australian nurses taken prisoner by the Japanese in Sumatra during World War II. She wrote about her three and a half years incarceration and survival in Portrait of a Nurse (published in 2001).[2]

She married Major George Colin Darling (NX101315 2/5 Infantry Battalion), a manager with the Port Kembla steelworks in 1957 and a widower with four children in 1949. She stopped nursing in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Colin Darling died in the early 1970s.[3]

Darling died in 2007, aged 94. Her husband George Colin Darling died in 1983, aged 76.

• Vivian Bullwinkel

• Women of Australia website
• Australian Nurses Memorial website
• Donwall Books website
• note: same link as "^ POWs of Japan above under References